But if they could pony up the cash and do what that article talks about then you have to think that EVERYONE who like this type of game will love it that much more, and I would think sales would do perhaps two or three times better than they are already (which is an astounding statement, I know). Skyrim is selling games hand over fist, but if the stuff in that article were included in Skyrim then you can bet dollars to donuts that even people who don't necessarily like RPG's would probably be buying it.

Personally, I play the vanilla Skyrim and I love it. LOVE it. And I still agree with most of what that IGN article says.

I don't say stuff like this often: this article is rubbish. Mostly, I think the author has been playing Fable too much and wants to be -told- if the character is good or evil. Real life is much more murky. Evil people think they're good, good people fear they're evil. The truth is difficult to discern is real life and in Skyrim. I say cheers.

Re: the rest of the article there are some good points but I think mostly its a "bash Skyrim and get sales" bit.

Just imho.

The article doesn't highlight the truly lacking and boring dialogue either.

Yet they give Skyrim a 9.5 out of 10. What's up with them?
Skyrim has some flaws here and there (I'm not talking about the PS3 version), but it's still a great game. If it wasn't great, I wouldn't have 217 hours of gameplay on steam...

They've evolved in areas that piss off old school RPG fans (ie. Morrowind/Daggerfalls main audience) and didn't eveolve in areas action gamers like (ie. combat, they have evolved a lot, but obviously not enough from the IGN article)

I believe Oblivion got the formula right if you were trying to appeal to both audiences, Morrowind got it right for RPG fans and Skyrim is sort of in no-mans land.

I don't want to be the leader of every guild. I find that somewhat contrived. I wouldn't mind if a few institutions were mutually exclusive (beyond the obvious Stormcloak/Empire divide). I love reading and I spent two hours the other day filling and sorting out two shelves of a bookcase in Honeyside. However, I do want flexibility in my playstyle. I don't want to be pinned down into some pre-defined class and be forced to deal with every conflict in the same way, with the same tactics. I don't want to have to plan out spreadsheets every time I start a new character and thus progress in an utterly pre-defined manner. I want to adapt in the middle of conflicts, I want my characters to evolve as they go through the world and react to things.

More fun then you don't feel opposite moral doing your action.
Fallout 3, a settler was attacked by a radscorpion far away, I tried to shoot it had 60% chance for hit in VAT and the lady was almost dead. I hit the lady and become neutral because the murder.
New Vegas killing loads of enemies is just fine, also looting the bodies but not the supplies as its stealing.

Yes there Hipppocrits!!!
There "Top reasons why dark souls will eat Skyrims face" Is stupid cause they Gave skyrim A 9.5 and dark souls A 9.0, Not to mention They gave skyrim "Best Rpg of the year"!

None of them MATTER though. It could be a clown attacking you for the dark brotherhood. At the end of the day, no one talks about it. There are no consequences that are permanent. Or make you feel bad. I must have missed like the 5 quests with consequences or something. It's not doing it ENOUGH then. I mean of course it tried, but failed horribly. It doesn't help their characters and voice acting are a cut above a card board box. It makes it hard to relate to them. We don't see their reactions unless we talk to them. The reactions dont happen until we talk to these NPC's. Nothing is its own. We dont see the people muttering as you pass buy and shaking their head in disproval. There's just so little reaction in the game. We don't see the consequences of killing the dark brotherhood on the world. We don't see the Tyranical Jarl they were supposed ot kill go on to treat his opulation as close to slaves as possible. I was never once attacked by the thieves, so I have no idea what your talking about. I beat that quest line and they sit around like a bump in the log. You dont see an increas ein beggars around town because the thieves guild has been stealing a lot and getting out of hand. Or people whispering of beatngs on those who dont pay protection.

I think that might be the problem. it all reacts around you, not the world. SO as soon as you stop apying attention the world doesnt matter. Nothing else is affecte dbut your tiny narrow vision of it. It's static. We don't see the Imperials treating former stormcloaks badly, or vice versa. IE hangings ot something. It's just not alive as a world. It's plastic wrapped for player convenience.

Edit
What's wrong with linkin TV tropes? Can't handle we're boring human beings who use the same things over and over again?

Good article. Sounds more honest than many others (like the ones shrugging off the downsides because the rest of it, allegedly, is so beyond awesomesauce). It's good for someone in the gamingpress to actually show some critical eye to these claimed "perfect" games instead of appearing as with a face smeared in seman "Oh dear, did I just.... 11/10 score, deffo!" Admiting short comings and giving them the weight they deserve is honesty, and serves the gaming community much better than all around general praise.

Maybe, if the initial reviews would've actually been reviews - looking at the whole picture - instead of parts of the marketing campaign, these kinds of onesided attentionseeking articles wouldn't appear.

http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Thief_%28Character%29

You proved my point, I didn't once see one of those. They aren't drawing enough attention to it. But once again once the thief goes away, everyone in town acts normal. No one is scared, they just sit around waiting for the hero to come along. The world doesn't feel alive. Though if I would have seen that event, I would applaud it as one of the few little details added ot the game. But that one example of the world reacting to the things you do isn't enough. It didn't have any persistence to it. It's some nameless thief who dies, big whoop.

I don't pay attention to what IGN says anymore.

It kinda makes me feel like IGN received a kickback from the developers of Dark Souls with the intent on making Skyrim look terrible through a smear campaign. This because they've been bashing Skyrim for sometime now. I'm not saying it's true, however... just makes me wonder.

You miss the point entirely. The world doesn't react to you no matter what you do. That's the point. You could be the most evil bastard on the planet but pay your bounty and everyone thinks your the bees knees again. There is no persistent tracking of any NPCs views about you so there are no consequences to whatever you do. You slaughter half a town in NV and you can never go back there. They will always hate you. As they should. You lose access to those merchants and those quests. As you should. Nothing you do in Skyrim has any meaning.

Well, ever thought that they could have done this TOO MUCH because it's SO TRUE?

On topic: The parts about the static world, the consequences is SOO FREAKING TRUE.
Same with the impotent player.
Enemy leveling is not perfect but imho it's good enough - I never really faced any problems with enemy levels. The leveling system on the other hand is flawed, but from other perspectives.
Combat is good enough for an RPG. It svcks as combat, but RPGs are not made good by their combat mechanics - they are made good by their RPG mechacnics, ie all the spreadsheety stuff behind the combat (which Skyrim more or less fails at, but then again so do all the offline RPGs of the last few years...)

The same could be said for Oblivion, nothing you did in that game really mattered.

WTF? They "bashed" Skyrim by giving it a 9.5 and naming it game of the year? Okay then. I'd hate to see what they do to a game they really don't like.

Magic didn't evolve, it got streamlined. Oddly enough it's mostly a good thing, though it turns my stomach to say so (I despise streamlining in games). There was a lot of junk in the old systems that did not produce enough impact to warrant its own existense (drain and burden spells being first and foremost offenders). That's about it though. Two-hand mechanic and dual casting is an amusing novelty for the first five minutes, then it becomes a kludge. It's like Morrowind's "either spells or weapons, but not both", only more kludgey. I miss being able to wield a sword and cast spells at their full power at the same time, one thing that Oblivion got right.

Oh yeah, and spellmaking is gone, that's not evolution.

Crafting is not evolution, it's a beaten-to-death mumorpuger mechanic, or a natural extension of alchemy mechanic that already existed in older TES.

Open world may be open, but it is sparsely populated and less believable than Morrowind was.

That particular perception on RPG's will change on February 7th.

Like I said, I don't catch up on what IGN dishes out to the pubic each and every time they release an article. The very few IGN articles that I've read regarding Skyrim wasn't pretty... and I must have purposefully missed their Skyrim scoring article for a reason.

Lore-wise Skyrim is the least populated province in all tamriel.

It at least had a rudimentary reputation system. You could be locked out of guilds based on your fame/infamy. You wouldn't be able to get certain information or quest based on your fame/infamy. Merchants would charge you more or less based on their disposition towards your fame/infamy. There were actually some consequences.

Carefully observe how people either target Dark Souls, IGN or even the writer personally in a vain attempt to dismiss the arguments brought up. I'm happy that this kind of articles are starting to pop up - an earlier comment about Skyrim being a blast the first week but then falling through with its initial "wow!" factor and revealing the shallow core within is very true. I'm guessing that we'll be seeing more of these articles.

Even the die-hard Skyrim fans should be happy with this: criticism is what improves games. Mindless praise does nothing but encourage stagnancy and laziness. So here's to hoping for a better handling of the RPG elements in TES' future.

I would take that bet, well, if donuts are worth less than a dollar these days, anyway.